Development and Testing of a Ground Based Health and Maintenance Reasoner

The Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation and the U.S. Army Aviation Development Directorate - Aviation Applied Technology Directorate have jointly sponsored the Capability-Based Operations and Sustainment Technology-Aviation (COST-A) program. The objective of COST-A has been to develop and demonstrate an integrated set of high-value diagnostics, prognostics, and system health management technologies for six different rotorcraft systems with a focus on reduced maintenance burden without sacrificing safety. This paper focuses on the COST-A Ground-Based System (GBS), which was developed to demonstrate an environment for translating the results from new COST-A technologies into actionable information to be provided to personnel in multiple maintenance roles. The approach was to build upon existing Army maintenance practices and tools used for aircraft that are currently equipped with health monitoring systems such as the Integrated Vehicle Health Management System (IVHMS) deployed on the UH-60 BLACK HAWK, while demonstrating the benefit of fusing onboard system data with historical fleet data and providing maintenance planning tools. The overall architecture and role of the GBS are described along with highlights of new GBS capabilities developed and demonstrated under COST-A.